This week in my lecture we had a new title and this one actually caught my eye from the title. It caught my eye because I always try and in my opinion I quite often fail so I was intrigued as to what we were going to learn in this lecture. The lecture today was called Failure of work and we started with the question:
What does failure mean?
Lack of success
The neglect or omission of expected or required action
We are conditioned to feel like we haven’t tried enough when we fail
Failure as a concept
Scott A. Sandage wrote Born Losers: A history of Failure in America at around the time of the Great Depression. It has always been known that if someone says 'I've failed, or I've made a failure' it's linked to money, for example if you fail your driving test you've then lost money because you've paid for lessons and the test.
There's a saying 'Good for nothing' which for example means they're good for £1000 or they're good for nothing meaning they're only good for money which I don't think is right. We then got told that WE WILL ALL FAIL which made me feel very reassured. I feel like I fail quite a lot because I can never make a decision or my ideas never turn out how I want them too. What also made me feel relieved was that everyone's opinion is different, some people may think you've failed and others won't think you've failed at all. We are also our own worst critic so something that is a little error could become a catastrophe in our mind.
We then went on to speak about desire paths, which I have never heard of but since finding out what they are I see them all the time. It's a path that is created by people wandering off into their own world creating a new path as they go, all it takes is for one person to follow for the path to be made. They're made as a more direct way for people to take. The most obvious desire paths are in snow but I've found my own desire path when walking across the road not at a crossing. When I noticed this it suddenly made me realise that a lot of people don't use the crossing as this path would have needed to have been created by a lot of people as this was once a hedge.
The two images below show how desire paths are created. They show how when buildings are created they are planned with paths in mind but then when they're opened to man kind they're suddenly changed by the natural paths a human takes.
Hacks:
One thing that I have never heard of known as a failure is hacking, IKEA hacking to be precise. This is when all products are taken from the IKEA website or store and then when we get home we can don whatever we want with it, we don't have to build it by the instructions, we don't even need to make it into the thing we bought it for. We can paint them or even put them in a different room. These are failures because we've bought them home and not used them for the purpose they were designed and produced for. As a class we all got asked a question to talk about with the people around us. The question was, Have you ever 'hacked' anything? Why did you do it?'
Dyed my hair - wanted a different hairstyle
Had my eyebrows done - couldn’t draw my eyebrows on properly
Had braces - I was told by my dentist but I hated my teeth as well
Tie dye top - thought I was cool
By hacking something we make something more useful in our lives and we see the potential in the object.
I found this lecture a lot more enjoyable than the previous two because the lecture wasn't based on one person. I also feel this lecture was very useful for me as I relate to it a lot.
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